From Bethlehem- A view of misthought Israeli history

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Perhaps the biggest single misthink in Western history is best understood by standing in the town square of Bethlehem, allowing one’s gaze to pass over the roof top of the Church that covers the stable where Jesus was supposedly born, and let one’s eye drift into the blue sky beyond and thinking: how on earth could it be that the Christians, whose belief in the divine centre around Jesus’ crucifixion carried out by Roman soldiers but done at the behest of the Jewish populace, could turn round nearly two millennia later and say to the Jews in effect: we buy the argument that you are God’s chosen people and this land is your land and we are going to turn it over to you as your “national home”, even though the Arabs or their forefathers have been living here since the Romans kicked the Jews out of Babylon after demolishing the Temple in AD 70. This is what British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, did in his famous Declaration, strongly backed by prime minister Lloyd George, a religious man who saw the Jewish cause as one that must be supported by Christian charity.

A more recent misthink: How could it be that the Jews of today could elect as prime minister in the year 2001 Ariel Sharon, when they had been voting for a peace candidate barely two years before? Sharon’s most successful campaign trick was to walk with a muscular entourage across the courtyard of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, the sacred Islamic territory from where Mohammed ascended to heaven for a night and claim this as Jewish territory for ever because down below are the remains of the Temple that the Romans destroyed. In helping provoke the second Intifada (uprising) and thus undermining the democratically elected government of Palestine to the great advantage of the militant Hamas, he showed both his irresponsibility and his total contempt for 1400 years of continuous Muslim presence. How would Christians have felt if he had strutted across the Piazza in front of St Peter’s and made a speech that slighted Christian claims to that piece of earth? How would the Jews have felt if the Palestinians had suspended political banners from the Dome at the top of the hill down over the sacred Wailing Wall below? Is there no sense of consistency or basic justice in the Israeli body politic? What is the point of subscribing to a religion of values if one can be so easily led by the nose by an unscrupulous politician out for power and vainglory and careless of human life that gets in his way? And aren’t the Jews as a rather small religious group the ones who have the most to lose if religious tolerance is undermined?

Also overlooked- it is rarely mentioned in today’s books on Jewish history, nor in Encyclopaedia Britannica, is that Palestine was described in the 12th century before Christ as an area of land between modern day Tel Aviv and Gaza. This was around the time Moses led the Jews out of Egypt to find the “Promised Land”. Moses led the Jewish troops up towards modern day Israel, fighting a number of tribes on the way. When it came to the most vigorous of their opponents, the Midianites, Moses said, according to the Bible’s Book of Numbers (in the Jewish Torah), that all the Middianites must be killed including women and children, apart from young virgins who must be married off to Jewish soldiers. This passage in the Old Testament is very rarely referred to by Jews, Christians or Muslims.

From Bethlehem- A view of misthought Israeli history

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